The Weird Wild West (The Weird and Wild Series)

by Faith Hunter

  He spit tobacco juice. “Bit extreme, don’t ya think?”

  Ann shrugged. “He was unnatural.”

  “So’re we.”

  “He was a null, darling.”

  “Seemed to help him ’gainst the shit we just faced. Probably woulda’ helped agin other shit we deal with.”

  Ann patted the side of his face. “If he went bad, he’d have been too difficult to stop without our magick working on him.”

  “I liked him. Felt like a good man.”

  “I’ll get you a partner.”

  “Didn’t say I wanted one.”

  “You didn’t have to, darling.”

  Truett settled his coat around his shoulders. “What’s my next assignment?”

  “I need you in Starvation Flats, by Vulture Ridge. You’ll wait for a woman and a child.”

  “On it.” He glanced at the pool, then turned away.

  “I can get you there faster.”

  He threw his hand up. “I’ll walk.”

  He didn’t glance back.

  Sundown

  Liz Colter

  The sound alerted Frank just as the sun dropped below the horizon, a drumming on the hard-packed earth. He’d never believed the stories of a black-masked bandit riding a hound as big as a horse, but he couldn’t deny what he saw out his own window. He crossed the sitting room at a run and bolted out the front door in time to see the man scoop Emily from beneath the apple tree. Without slowing, the bandit slung the limp form of Frank’s eight-year-old daughter across the giant dog he rode—a short-haired beast the silver of liquid mercury with eyes like milk.

  In the two dozen strides it took Frank to reach the corral, the bandit was already halfway across the pasture. Frank threw the gate open and scrambled onto his piebald mare bareback; the hound had a good lead but the mare had heart. Tangling his fingers into her mane, he kicked her into a gallop through the rough field. He was gaining ground when the bandit jerked the dog’s bridle hard right. Frank pushed his left knee into the horse’s ribs, and she obediently cut to follow the hound.

  The man he pursued looked back and Frank’s blood chilled. The black bandana was molded to the bandit’s face like skin and covered him to his hatband with no sign of eyeholes. The wanted posters labeled him “The Child-Napper” but folk all called him Sundown, saying he was seen most often right at sunset.

  The gap between them had closed by more than half when what looked like solid ground suddenly gave way. The mare’s forelegs sank into the collapsing hole and Frank launched over her head, landing hard on one hip. The impact tore at the half-healed bullet wound in his left side, a parting gift from his last shootout in Layton. He rolled to his knees in time to see his daughter and her kidnapper disappear over a rise.

  The mare thrashed out of the sinkhole, snorting and tossing her head, though nothing looked to be broken. Frank struggled to his feet, latched onto her mane and calmed her before she could run. He glanced down into the hole where she’d fallen. Leathery limbs and dried bones poked up through the dirt. It looked to be an old grave that Frank hadn’t known existed. A mass grave of pioneers maybe, ambushed or stranded decades ago.

  He re-mounted inelegantly, belly-flopping over the mare’s back with a grunt. White-hot pain flared from his old bullet wound to the new hip strain. Angry with himself for not pausing to grab a gun, he turned the horse toward the house. June was waiting for him on the porch when he cantered up to the hitching rail outside the front door. Her lines were tense, seeing his urgency but not understanding the cause.

  “Emily’s been taken,” he said, sliding off the mare’s back. “That bandit they’ve been talking about.” He yanked a bridle from the post and secured the horse.

  “Sundown?” She gripped the banister. Her thoughts visibly leaped down the same paths as Frank’s had done: shock, quickly shifting to fear of things more horrific than a kidnapping. “Do you think the stories are true?” Her voice was tight but steady.

  He thought of the man’s eyeless face, the unnatural hound. “I don’t know. I didn’t before, but I got a good look at him. Now...I just don’t know.”

  Frank didn’t want to believe that the first boy to disappear from this town had been abducted for a month, and escaped by clawing his way out of a shallow grave. Or that Dawson’s seven-year-old boy had also been gone for a month and said he didn’t remember anything at all. His parents thought he’d been too traumatized by his experience to remember, though the boy seemed fine. Until now, Frank had suspected the whole thing was a local legend grown out of all proportion, the boys playing it up. He wouldn’t have given the stories any credence at all except that Sam Holland’s girl was missing. She’d disappeared just before Frank moved his family here. It would be a month tomorrow. Frank had warned his daughter to stay inside this time of day, just in case, but Emily had always been one to test her boundaries.

  He met his wife’s eyes, pulling her from visions of Emily he could imagine too well. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said quietly. “If I go into town and ask Bill to send out a posse, they won’t get one going until morning.”

  He watched the play of emotions on June’s face. He’d made her a promise and it was up to her to release him from it or not. Frank had turned his star over to his deputy a month ago. He’d left Layton, wounded and older than his thirty-eight years, to become a rancher for her sake.

  She was quiet for the space of a breath, weighing. “You go on after Sundown, then. I’ll ride into town to tell the sheriff.”

  June came down off the porch and gripped his forearm. “You were twice the lawman Bill Watley could ever hope to be, and a better tracker than anyone around here.” The lines around her eyes were tight with the risk of losing her husband and only child both, just when she’d thought this part of their life was over. “You go find our girl.”

  “I’ll need my Colt and my Winchester. Some water and jerky, too.”

  June hurried inside while Frank limped to the barn for a saddle. She returned quickly, hung the canteen on the saddle horn and slipped the rifle into the scabbard while Frank tightened the cinch. The revolver she handed to him over the saddle.

  Frank tied the saddlebags on and June packed the venison jerky while he secured a blanket behind the saddle. She stepped back as he mounted and turned the mare. He didn’t look back, but he could feel her watching him as he rode away.

  ~*~

  The fickle shadows of twilight were the worst time of day to track, but Frank followed the enormous dog prints well enough through the sandy soil out into the arroyos and canyons to the east. He chaffed at the encroaching darkness. All it would take was one good windstorm and the tracks would be gone forever. He searched the hills to either side periodically, as if he might see Emily standing on some outcrop, just waiting for him to come and get her.

  The dry wash he’d been following came to an end in a low embankment. He halted and dismounted, careful not to eradicate any tracks. The hip pain was easing slightly, but the dull ache in his side had worsened with riding. He studied the ground while his horse bumped the reins trying to gain an extra few inches to graze the sparse brush.

  Whatever the beast that had made these prints, it had spent a fair bit of time around here lately. Tracks ran in all directions. Close inspection indicated they were freshest to the right. Frank looked up the rocky ridge. There was barely enough light left to see the marks in the deep sand at his feet; the hard-packed hillside would be impossible. He untied his bedroll from the saddle, trying not to think how the odds of finding Emily would decrease overnight. Ten years with June, and Emily was their only child to survive more than a year. She was everything to him. His fearless tomboy. His story-time cuddler.

  ~*~

  At first light Frank rode up the hill. Near the top it turned to almost continuous rock. Even if June had galvanized the sheriff into action, a posse would never find him over this terrain. Dismounting, he led his horse, moving slowly and scanning for the slightest telltale signs: the light ch
alk-colored scratches from the beast’s nails, a scuff in the sand that littered the rock, a fragment of a paw print in the dirt-filled spaces. Maybe one tracker in a hundred could track with any accuracy over rock, but Frank had once owned a reputation as one of them.

  Focused on the ground, he flinched at a sudden fluttering above his head. A barn owl perched near the top of the juniper tree next to him had spooked. The nocturnal owl being out in full daylight surprised him until he noticed its eyes. Instead of sharp and black, they were milky-white. The blindness explained the bird’s presence, but the similarity to Sundown’s hound made his spine prickle.

  Frank topped the ridge and started down the far side of the hill. He was about halfway down when the trail vanished entirely. Tying his horse to a scrubby bush, he returned to the last set of scratches he’d seen and dropped to his hands and knees. The scratch on the far left was deeper than the other two. A weight shift? The animal might have turned. Searching to his left, he found a depression at the sandy edge of a rock. More signs ahead led into a narrow gully. Leaving his horse tied, he pulled his rifle from the scabbard and eased down the eroded wash. The tracks disappeared around a boulder. Frank cocked his rifle as quietly as he could. He placed his back against the boulder and peered around the side.

  The boulder stood nearly touching another large rock, like pillars of some giant doorway. Between the two boulders lay an entrance to a bowl of sand hemmed in by rocky walls on all sides. The giant hound was stretched out in the middle of the sand, asleep. Sundown was nowhere to be seen.

  Frank controlled his fear enough to breathe again, though in quick, shallow pants. On the opposite side of the bowl lay a similar gap between two up-thrusts. Paw prints entered on Frank’s side, but no boot prints came out. Knowing how little it took to bring his own cattle dog from sound sleep to full alert, he eased around gently, turning his chest to the rock. With little more than his left eye exposed, he settled in to watch the far cleft. Only one thing stirred during his vigil—a small lizard bumped into his left boot. It climbed quickly up and over, scurrying away, but not before Frank saw its opaque, blind eyes.

  ~*~

  A pink and orange softness crept across the sky and the air took on the quiet of day ending. Frank’s eyes stung with the strain of watching. He rubbed at them. When he looked again, Sundown was there. The hound looked up suddenly, adding to Frank’s suspicion that the bandit had not come in by the cleft but had simply appeared.

  The enormous dog pushed to its feet and nosed the man’s shoulder. Sundown patted its muscular neck, then turned and squatted near the base of one of the rock walls. The hound watched with blind eyes as the masked bandit laid both hands reverently on a patch of sand.

  Frank would never have a better opportunity than this. He lowered his rifle and aimed at the center of Sundown’s back. “Freeze.”

  The man froze, but the hound did not. It turned with a snarl and crossed half the distance to Frank in one leap.

  “Off!” Sundown commanded, in a voice as rough as rocks grinding together. The hound stopped. Sundown stood slowly and turned to face Frank, keeping his hands visible.

  Frank locked his muscles to stop them trembling, and held the gun aimed at the center of Sundown’s chest. He tried not to think about that eyeless mask and the blind hound snarling at the man’s side.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “She’s here, safe,” Sundown answered calmly, his hands still raised.

  Frank scanned the small bowl as if he might have missed her. “Where?” He entered the circle of rock and walked toward the bandit. He’d ram the barrel of his rifle right down the son-of-a-bitch’s throat if that’s what it took to force the words out.

  The sand where Sundown had been squatting a moment before suddenly stirred. Fingers broke the surface and a small hand pushed up out of the earth. Frank stared in dumb amazement as an arm followed the hand, reaching toward the sky. He felt dizzy, too far from what was normal and right in the world. His eyes locked on the roiling sand, afraid of what might follow the arm.

  He tore away from the sight a heartbeat too late. Sundown had lunged. The gun jerked from Frank’s hands as the bandit threw his weight onto it and rolled to the ground. Frank instinctively went for his pistol but, quick as he was, Sundown had the rifle leveled at him before Frank could draw.

  “I need to help this girl so it goes easier on her,” Sundown said, standing. His gruff voice was quiet and reasonable. “Toss your pistol over here.”

  He’d been a fool to take his eyes off the man. Frank eased his pistol from the holster and tossed it at Sundown’s feet.

  Sundown shoved the pistol under his belt and backed up. He took the small, pale fingers in his own. When he pulled, the head and torso of a young girl emerged. Frank had seen her likeness posted around town. It was Betty Holland, Sam Holland’s twelve-year-old girl.

  Sundown mumbled some words in an unusual cadence, almost like the words to a song or poem. He tugged on her arm a little harder and Betty came all the way out of the ground, sand cascading from her clothes. The girl stood quietly at his side. Her expression was blank, her eyes fixed on some far point, as if unaware of anyone or anything around her. Holding her hand, Sundown moved to a low boulder and sat, the rifle still leveled at Frank. The girl obediently sat next to him.

  “I suppose you’d like to know what this is all about.” A twist in his voice and his mask gave the impression that he smiled.

  “I’d like to know where my daughter is, you sick son of a whore, and what you’ve been doing to these children.”

  “Betty here’s been buried for the full month she’s been gone, and I’ve done nothing to her but give her a second chance at life. You know she had the cholera?”

  Frank nodded. He’d heard her mama was sleeping in a chair by her sick bed the night Betty disappeared.

  “She died.” Sundown said, “I felt the death and I came for her. If I can get them before sunrise, I can save them.”

  “Only God can raise the dead, and he chooses not to.”

  “Well, God and me see differently on that, I guess.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Most wouldn’t,” Sundown said conversationally with a shrug. “My own boy died two years ago. Mountain lion attack when we were hunting. It got my boy first and jumped me when I tried to help him. Broke my neck in one bite.” Sundown’s forearm flexed, as if he squeezed Betty’s hand tighter as he spoke.

  “Next thing I remember, I was in the dark with something brighter than daylight ahead of me. My wife, who’d passed from influenza the year before, called my name. I was walking toward her when I heard my boy moan. I couldn’t leave him.” He shifted the rifle braced against his hip, keeping it leveled at Frank as he spoke. “Getting out of there was like swimming quicksand. By the time I made it back, my boy was dead. And so was I, though I wouldn’t admit it.”

  “So that’s why you steal other folks’ kids? ’Cause you lost your own?” He scanned the rocks and crevices again, looking for any sign of Emily. Clothing. Blood.

  Sundown shook his head. “I save other people’s children because too many die young.” Sundown raised his and Betty’s joined hands, presenting her as an example. “My connection with death makes me aware of the dying and the dead, so I use it. That’s how I sensed that grave at your place.”

  The man had the relaxed posture and sincere tones of someone telling the truth. Frank would’ve believed none of it, except that an eyeless man with an unholy hound was telling the story and Betty, just come up out of the ground, was sitting by him in a trance. He’d dealt with outlaws his entire life, though, he knew better than to think of them as anything but a pack of liars. He needed to keep the man talking until he gave away some clue to where Emily was hidden.

  “Why bury them?”

  “Death can’t see them when they’re buried. If I keep them in the ground for a turn of the moon, he loses his hold over them altogether. It took me a while to get it right, but i
n the last year I’ve managed to save a dozen children.”

  “Seems if you’re doing good, like you say, you’d do it in the open. Let people know you could help them.”

  Sundown laughed, a coarse, phlegmy sound. “Would you have trusted me if I’d knocked on your door and told you I was going to take your daughter?”

  The coming evening was shading the hideout to light gray. Frank heard a gunshot and distant sounds of horses whinnying at the loud report. The posse must have followed the hound’s old tracks. The men were hunting dinner, having made camp somewhere far to the north.

  “What about Wallace and Mary Anderson’s baby? They lost her to typhoid not two months ago.”

  “If it’s in the daytime, I can’t do anything about it. I’m in Death’s lands between sunup and sunset.”

  “So why did you take Emily?” he asked, playing his final card, the one he was sure would reveal all Sundown’s falsehood. “She was as healthy as I am.”

  “She was until she fell from that tree. Her neck broke as clean as my own.”

  “Prove it,” Frank said unsteadily. “Show her to me.” He searched the sandy circle, unwilling to imagine Emily lying somewhere beneath the surface.

  “I can’t,” Sundown said. “If I bring her above ground, Death will find her.” He stood, letting go of Betty and taking the rifle in both hands. “I know this is hard for you, but you need to go. You leave Emily in my care and you have my word I’ll see her safely back to you a month from now.”

  Frank looked from the rifle in Sundown’s hands to the hound still tensed to attack. “Will she be blind?” he asked, stalling. “Like you and the hound?” The owl. The lizard.

  “No more than Betty here is. It’s why I keep this mask on.” Sundown walked toward Frank. “Things ain’t supposed to look on living death, I guess. What sees me without my mask doesn’t see anything ever again.” He nodded to the giant hound. “Hank was Death’s hound before I stole him. Being blind don’t seem to bother him anymore than it does me.”