by Faith Hunter
Lonan shook his head. “He is related to them,” the Indian said, “cursed to wander this world full of the venom of evil. If one of these creatures bites a man, the man either becomes one of them or dies a painful death.”
“What determines which end they meet?” the Chaplain said, leaning forward on his bunk.
“The goodness in their heart,” the old man said softly.
The Chaplain chuckled; it was a dry thing, like dead leaves spun on the wind. “So if you’re a bad person, you change, and if you’re good...”
“You die,” Lonan said. “It is a mercy, truly. Life for these things is a torture. Why did you laugh?”
“Because, my friend, I am a very, very bad man,” Chap said.
“You do not seem so,” Lonan said.
The Chaplain shrugged. “I am. A few days back I shot my friend. He was called the Captain. We served in the war together. We endured that madness and survived it, and when I had a dark second to myself, for no one to see, I shot him dead and blamed it on a Pinkerton agent.”
“Why did you kill your friend?” Lonan asked, his face still calm.
“One less share to split of the money we stole,” Chap said looking past the bars to a terrible place inside himself. “He saved my life a few times. We’d laughed and cried together. He was my brother, my friend. Truth is, I couldn’t say why I killed him. I pretend I live by some imaginary code, but scrub that off, and all that’s left is bad.”
Both men were quiet for a time. Finally, Lonan stood and stretched. He turned to Chap. “The Cherokee have a story,” Lonan began. “They say there are two wolves living inside each of us. One wolf is good—compassion, joy, love, hope, and sacrifice. The other is evil—greed, anger, guilt, arrogance, and false pride. The two wolves war constantly inside each of us.”
Chap looked up from the floor at the old man. “Which one wins?” he asked.
“The one you feed,” Lonan said.
The iron door of the jail opened with a groan. Sheriff Canebreak entered with one of the men who had been with him at Lynch’s place. Gurney was with him too, looking much better, smiling, in fact. The sheriff nodded to the two men and they drew their guns. Gurney’s revolver was pointed right at the Chaplain’s heart.
“Okay, you two,” Canebreak said, unlocking the cell, “walk out nice and gentle. You try anything these two fellas will lay you low. You have an appointment at the church.”
The Chaplain looked at Gurney, at his gun. “What the hell you doing, Gurney?”
“You’ll understand,” Gurney said, gesturing with his gun, “real soon, Chap. Hell, they’ll probably make you damn mayor around here.”
Lonan stepped out of the cell and the Sheriff moved away from him. “It’s the well for this here damn injun sorcerer and that bitch you brought into town with you,” Canebreak said. “They both smell too damn bad, or good—depending on how you look at it—to bite, but they’ll feed the little ones down in the well. They’ve been ornery since hatching time, hungry little fuckers. Yeah, your crew rounded up the bitch after that boy, Isaiah, came around.”
Chap looked at Gurney. “This all there is to it?” Chap said. “I save your life and you turn into one of these damn things, go along, pretty as you please. I thought you had more sand than that.”
Gurney’s eyes changed, they became dead black. His tongue, now forked, shot out between his lips and retreated to his mouth. “You might just want to shut your damn mouth there, Chap,” Gurney said. “Else I decide to throw you in with the old Indian, and the girl. I’ve seen that well. You don’t want to go down there. Makes hell look like a whore’s parlor.”
“Settle down, now,” Canebreak said. “We got plans for him, he’s a joiner for our little community, that he is. Now come on.”
Gurney had always been hard to rile, but this Gurney wasn’t. Chap gave his old friend a sideways look, and Gurney raised his gun to pistol-whip his former friend. In that instant, the gun wasn’t pointed at Chap, and he grabbed the burning lantern off the post and smashed it into Gurney’s face. The hot oil ignited, and Gurney screamed. There was a gunshot, and Canebreak was screaming something. Chap pried Gurney’s pistol free of his spasming hands. Gurney was flailing about, and Chap kicked him toward Canebreak. Chap heard the sheriff cuss and then scream as Chap spun and fired at the other gunman, his pistol smoking in his hand as he turned to fire again at Chap. Chap fanned the Colt and three bullets howled to the other man’s one. The gunman hit the floor, bleeding, choking, as Chap began to smell smoke and burning meat.
He looked back to Lonan. The old man was hit in the arm and was struggling to his feet. Chap helped him. There were no more screams—both Gurney and Canebreak were dead, their bodies blackening and curling up on themselves as if they were made of paper, not flesh and blood. Chap looked at the old Zuni.
“Fire purifies,” Lonan said. Chap handed him Gurney’s pistol and grabbed a Winchester and a bandoleer of bullets from behind the desk. The wooden post and the furniture were already catching and black smoke was gathering everywhere.
“Let’s get out of here before it purifies us,” Chap said, heading for the door.
Outside the desert night was deep, cold, and slumbering. The town seemed empty, just like when they had rode in, but far down the street was the sound of voices, singing a tuneless hymn Chap did not recognize and didn’t want to.
“That arm okay?” Chap asked. Lonan nodded. “Good. I want you to get us horses and water, and get my crew’s saddlebags from the boarding house. Then you start purifying this whole goddamned town, you hear me.
Lonan nodded, smiling. “Yes. And you?”
“I’m getting Anna,” he said. “Only reason she’s in any of this mess is on account of me and mine. I’ll meet you at the edge of town.”
The old man nodded and then was gone into the darkness. The Chaplain loaded the rifle carefully as he walked down Main Street toward the old church with the well in front of it.
~*~
A crowd had gathered in front of the church, about fifty people all told. Most were armed. The Chaplain had a bag slung over his shoulder, and he cradled the rifle in his other hand. A cigar he had picked up at the Snakebite hung at the corner of his mouth. It burned cherry red at the tip. He stopped about twenty feet from the edge of the crowd, who had all turned silently to regard him. He scanned the faces: all were black dead eyes, like Gurney’s and Lynch’s, inhuman eyes.
“Not looking for trouble here,” the Chaplain said, “Just give me the girl and we’ll be on our way.”
“Don’t work that way here, Chap,” Hoxie said, stepping to the front of the crowd. His pistol was stuffed in his belt, an easy draw for him. “You either join the nest, or you feed the nest.”
“I ain’t never been much of a joiner,” Chap said. “Most of the folks I see here don’t look like they have too much experience with a shooting iron. I figure they don’t want this to turn ugly.”
“We do,” Josh said, stepping beside Hoxie. Isaiah joined him on the other side of Bill. “There’s three of us and we know all your tricks, Chap. Why not just join up?”
“It’s ain’t that bad,” Isaiah said. “Part of you dies, but all the stuff you wanted to do, but were scared to...it wakes up—wide awake. You’ll love it.”
“Where’s the girl?” Chap asked.
“In the well,” Hoxie said. “Feeding the little ones.”
“Well, then,” Chap said, “let’s get to it.” He brought the Winchester up fast, but Hoxie already had a shot. He fired at Bill and saw his head explode about the same time he felt the hot nail hammered into his chest. He gasped, cocked the rifle and fired again, this time at Josh—the better shot. Josh’s bullet hit him in the upper leg, but he managed to stay on his feet. Josh fell. Isaiah’s bullet missed Chap, and he pivoted on this good leg and put a bullet into the last of his crew. All three were still. Chap could feel the hot bullet sizzling in his chest. He coughed blood and reached into the bag.
The town
speople were changing before him—eyes dark voids, jaws opening wide, fangs appearing, dripping. Chap watched as their skin began to stretch, and then split at the mouths. Their bodies fell to the dust like great circus tents, collapsing. Massive rattlesnakes slithered from the mouths of the loose, empty, human skin. The air buzzed with the sound of their fist-sized rattles.
Chap used the fancy cigar to light the rag in the neck of one of the liquor bottles he had also taken from the empty saloon. Hurled it and tried not to pass out from the pain. It exploded in the middle of the crowd, and they hissed. Those who hadn’t completely changed yet screamed in terror. He threw another as a few bullets whined in his direction, but none hit. More fire, more of the locals screaming. The third bottle hit the pretty little church, and it erupted into flame. The creatures scattered to the quivering shadows thrown by the fire. This side of Black Fang was burning. He took Hoxie’s pistol and limped to the well. It was deep darkness below. He heard Anna scream. There was a rope tied to the stone edge of the well. He looped it about his waist and slid into the darkness with a dead man’s gun in one hand, a burning bottle of whiskey in the other.
The chamber at the bottom of the well smelled of fear and the dry breath of reptiles. There were bones everywhere, and hundreds of rattlesnakes slithered and coiled among the dry remains of the dead. Anna was perched on a pile of broken rib cages. She screamed as she saw him descend.
“Hang on,” he said as he threw the whiskey bottle into a nest of dozens of too-large snake eggs. The whole side of the chamber exploded in fire, and it spread quickly. Screams came from the eggs—a horrible gurgling sound like colicky babies drowning in phlegm. He landed on the sand floor. Anna jumped into his arms. The Chaplain winced in pain and then began to pull them up. A large rattler launched itself at Anna. Chap blew its head off with a clean shot from the pistol. The nest chamber roared with hungry flames. Snakes sizzled and popped as the flames devoured them. They reached the mouth of the well to be greeted by more flames. Black Fang was burning. Anna helped him walk as they headed for the other side of town.
“You didn’t get bit did you?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “But I was about to. Thank you, bless you.”
Lonan was waiting for them with horses and saddle bags stuffed with money. They rode hard out of the inferno that was Black Fang. The fires from the town illuminated the indigo tatters of the final gasp of night. None of them looked back.
~*~
The sun was high and merciless when Chap called to stop. He fell from his horse. Anna started to dismount.
“Stay away,” Chap said. “Stay on the horse.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. The Chaplain pulled up his trouser leg to show the dark bruises and swelling around two deep punctures. He slumped back onto a large rock and hacked up some more blood.
“We got to get you to a town,” Anna said, “to a doctor!”
“No,” Chap said. He was pale and sweating. “There’s a chance I’ll turn into one of those damn things and...no. No, I’m not letting that happen.”
“We can’t just leave you,” she said.
“Yes, you can,” Chap said. “Take this money, Anna—do good with it. Call it a wedding present. Lonan will get you to a town. Go on. Find your fella, Anna.”
“If you begin to change...” Lonan said. The Chaplain patted the revolver next to him.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“What if it was just a normal rattler,” Anna said. “You could die out here for nothing.”
“I’ll keep my horse,” Chap said. “If I think I’m safe I’ll come along after you. Don’t you fret.” He looked from the woman to the old man. The Zuni nodded.
“So which one is going to win in me?” The Chaplain asked. Thunder boomed, and heat lighting danced across the sky.
“The one you fed the most,” Lonan replied and glanced at Anna. “The fight’s never lost, or won.”
“Come,” Lonan said to Anna.
“I’ll pray for your soul,” Anna said.
“Put in a good word for me,” the Chaplain replied with a smile. “Take care, Anna.”
They rode away, Anna looking back. Soon, they were dark specks at the edge of the endless wastes, then they were gone.
He was alone. He pulled out his bag of tobacco and his father’s bible and flipped to a random page. The words caught his eye. “They will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” The Chaplain laughed, and made his cigarette.
They were many miles away when Anna heard it. A single rumble echoing through the canyons and mesas, across the wasteland. Till the day she died, she never knew if it was a gunshot, or the sound of futile thunder.
Rocky Rolls Gold
David Sherman
Vlanch rolled his shoulders in a not-quite shrug; it sounded like boulders grinding together. “What can we do?” he asked in a gravel-pit voice that somehow managed to sound plaintive.
Grubble shook her head, a boulder pinging down a rocky slope. “You claim you’re the smart one,” she said in a voice not as gravel-pitty as Vlanch’s, more like a shaken sack of pebbles. “You tell me what we can do.”
He blinked at her; if the lids that scraped across his eyeballs had been steel, they would have struck sparks. “You heard the Dwarf. If we go back there, it will not go well for us.” He raised his left arm to display the light streak where a blow from the pick wielded by the Dwarf leader had gouged his side. He knew the Dwarf had meant to only scratch him that time.
“But you promised me gold and gems!” Grubble squealed, a granite spike scraping down a sheet of slate.
“And I will get you gold for your birthday, and gems for our anniversary,” he rumbled. Then, in a voice like sand sliding on a gentle grade, “Just not from the Dwarves.” He looked down the mountainside, past the green band where trees girded its loins, to the red gash in the ground just above where the mountain turned to plain. A red line where Men had recently finished constructing one of their aboveground caves, a place that was quickly vanishing as Men planted greenery and laid out roads and walkways.
Another line of barren ground, angling down the mountainside until it passed nearly a mile north of the hotel, was the trackway of an avalanche, dotted by boulders, large, medium, but mostly small, and kept clear of new trees and shrubs by the passage of an occasional freshly tumbling boulder.
Vlanch ignored the copse of thin, mirrored towers that rose offset to one side of the structure, which he knew stood very nearly atop the Dwarven gold mine they’d been forced from. Instead, he looked at the swath of forest that backed against the hotel, and the rock-strewn ground above the trees. A plan began to form in his mind.
Vlanch and Grubble squatted in that trackway, looking like nothing so much as two piles of boulders, one slightly larger than the other. A casual viewer looking in their direction might wonder at boulders piled thusly. But nobody looked that way.
~*~
A green-eyed woman with an ivory complexion and ruby lips stood at the check-in desk of the Glittering Nugget Hotel; two traveling trunks and a carpetbag sat on the floor at her side. She was in obvious disagreement with the clerk who opposed her from the far side of the counter.
“You cannot deny a woman a room simply because she is traveling unaccompanied,” she stated firmly. “Especially not when she has wired ahead to reserve a room. I have been so looking forward to this holiday, too much so to allow an impertinent clerk to disturb it.”
“Madam,” the clerk said haughtily, “the Glittering Nugget Hotel has its reputation to consider. Unaccompanied women checking into a hotel are often…well, I don’t wish to be indelicate. But I cannot let you have a room. I’m certain you can find suitable quarters elsewhere, perhaps in the workers’ lodging.” A smirk graced his visage.
Danger flared in the woman’s green eyes, and she parted her lips to verbally lash the imper
tinent clerk when a man in a newly cleaned frock coat stepped to the counter and spoke to her.
“Miss Kitty Belle!” he said with clear delight, and raised fingers to his brow, as though touching the brim of a hat.
She turned her face to him. “Why, so I am, Mister Cheyenne Walker,” she said, with a slight nod of her head.
“Is Mister Reghaster causing you distress about your registration?” Walker asked.
“Not as much distress as I shall cause him if he doesn’t promptly honor my reservation!”
Walker slowly shook his head. “I’d rather you didn’t. It’s so hard to find clerks proficient in the operation of the Babbage Analytical Engine.”
“This hotel has a Babbage Analytical Engine?” she asked, with obvious surprise. When Walker replied in the affirmative, she turned to the clerk. “I want to see it in operation,” she demanded.
“But—” he said uncertainly, and looked to Walker. Walker simply smiled softly.
“And what might your position be here? Surely you’re not the manager,” she asked Walker while observing the clerk clack fingertip levers to make a punch card.
A sound like teapot-whistle emitted from beneath the counter. “Are you brewing chai?” she demanded of Reghaster.
“That is the engine that provides the motive power for the Babbage,” the clerk replied haughtily.
Walker ignored the byplay and answered her original question. “I have a table in the salon, and share my winnings with the hotel.”
“And how often are you challenged?”
Walker laughed. “Never! Ever since the incident on the Samuel Clemens, I remove my coat and pull up my shirtsleeves before I game. None can claim I slip hidden cards into my hand.” Miss Kitty well recalled their sojourn on the paddlewheeler and could not fault him his caution.
