The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  The saviours of Red Rock had swept through in the wake of Iron Horse’s armour. Every Japanese soldier had been impaled to confirm the kill. The ghost dancers had collected their wounded, but their dead remained among the enemy. Time permitted the salvage of men who might still fight, but the dead had danced their last.

  “Tell Doc not to bother coming up,” Lightholler said. “His former occupation won’t be of much use at present.”

  “What about Joseph?” she said. “Where is he?”

  Lightholler pointed westwards. The horizon was lost in dismal grey fog. He ushered her back into the shack, his hand maintaining a firm grip on her arm.

  Shine’s radio crackled abruptly. “Wicahcala kin heya pe lo maka kin.” Kennedy’s voice, distorted and broken in transmission, was an unfamiliar snarl.

  “What’s happening out there?” she asked.

  “A massacre. But it’s bought us some time. Tell Doc to wrap up the equations as soon as he can.” Lightholler gave the grounds another cheerless inspection. “They’ll be back.”

  Hayes said, “I’ll fire up the generator.”

  “Don’t,” Lightholler said. “We don’t know what the japs have behind those two divisions. I don’t want the carapace primed until Doc has the coordinates locked in.”

  He stepped back out onto the grounds. His escort had shifted away, regarding him with watchful eyes. Morgan and Shine were talking quietly by the radio. Dust whirled to the south of the compound’s ashes.

  Lightholler felt the thunder in the soles of his feet well before he saw the horses break through the eddying smoke and dust. The posse pounded across the grounds and halted before him in a storm of flying sand. There were four riders in all.

  Tecumseh dismounted awkwardly. His right leg was a seared fusion of flesh and uniform. His face bore a ragged cut that ran red across his brow. He gripped a tomahawk in his gnarled fist. Lightholler had supposed it to be ceremonial, but Tecumseh’s weapon was dulled with black gore. His eyes peered at Lightholler from darkened sockets. “How long?” His voice was a hoarse croak.

  “Two hours. Maybe less. Where’s Captain Iron Horse?”

  “He’s reclaimed the western defences and holds them now.” The medicine man grunted. “I leave these men to you.” He indicated his companions with a wave.

  They dismounted and stood at attention, each offering a brisk nod. Their war bonnets were adorned with fresh red symbols among the feathers. According to Shine, each distinctive marker represented a kill.

  Tecumseh’s bonnet was a spray of scarlet.

  He grabbed the reins of his horse, a dappled Appaloosa, and remounted with barely a wince. He gazed down at Lightholler. “Wankantanka nici un.”

  “Where are you headed?” Shine looked up from his radio.

  “The major’s attacking their main supply dump. He’s turned the Union guns against them but the fighting is fierce. He’s five miles out. With your leave, Captain, I’ll ride out to join him.”

  Morgan said, “You’ll never make it through their lines.”

  Lightholler wasn’t sure at which point they’d all come to realise that Kennedy was lost to them, but it was their silent, bitter accord. He said, “You won’t get past their guns.”

  Tecumseh struck the fabric of his shirt. “The prairie is so big and wild, there is so much space for bullets to spend themselves. I will be spared.”

  Looking up at Tecumseh now, Lightholler marvelled at the hope that had brought him through so many terrors and obstacles. Who could have ever truly believed that this task would be an easy one? This final battle, waged not so much between good and evil as between ignorance and insight, smacked of Armageddon.

  He grabbed one of the horses and mounted up before anyone could protest. His selection, a white sorrel, was robust at seventeen hands high. It gave a slight whinny and stamped at the pebbled earth.

  Tecumseh shot him a dark look.

  Lightholler said, “Two hours to ride in, find the major, and ride out. Piece of cake.”

  Tecumseh said, “You are not coming with me, Captain.”

  “We have seven of your best warriors watching the cavern. Iron Horse holds the western ridge. As you say, the prairie is so big and wild.” Lightholler pointed at his chest. “We’ll be spared.”

  Shine looked up at him, pleadingly.

  He said, “We’re going to need a radio, Martin.”

  Shine shouldered the radio pack eagerly and approached the horses. He mounted up.

  Morgan eyed the three riders pensively, focusing on the savage aspect of Tecumseh and Lightholler’s own visage, alien behind the gas mask. He shrugged, grabbed a pair of reins, and struggled onto a chestnut stallion. Glancing over at Lightholler’s white steed he asked, “Does this make me Pestilence or Famine?”

  Lightholler snapped his reins and the charger wheeled westwards on a cloud of white powder. He threw Morgan a look over his shoulder and said, “Take your pick.”

  XXV

  April 29, 2012

  Groom Mine, Nevada

  Kennedy’s command car careened wildly, its course a rowdy sideways slide down the rocky decline. The driver was using all his skills just keeping the vehicle upright.

  Halfway down the slope and the enemy guns would find their range. Kennedy called a halt and the car skidded into a trough of flung shale. He adjusted his goggles and surveyed the attack.

  The escarpment was a knuckled promontory in a sea of smoke. A V of Jacksons ploughed forwards, their shells directed at the wide picket of enemy supplies. Heavy machine-guns sputtered ruin among the climbing formations of Japanese infantry. Within moments, the tanks had entered their thinning ranks. Ghost dancer mortars chased the rolling armour, creating a region of whirling shrapnel and sudden death.

  The first wave of dancers whooped and leapt, a surging blue crest of bared bayonets and metal-lashing gunfire. They broke upon the Japanese ranks and punched through. Serried cobalt arrowheads drove onwards, piercing the chaotic grey columns oftenemy infantry.

  The deformed shell of a Jackson was a blackened, corpse-ridden husk. A second Jackson, the target of multiple bazooka rounds, surfed a swell of pebbled sand. Its crew, with their chainmail face plates and exposed body armour, rode its skirting like knights of old. They leapt off as the tank fireballed, a landborne comet that detonated at the foot of the slope.

  The next wave of dancers struck little resistance, their movement a grim ballet among the fleeing soldiers, but along the hillside an intolerable number of blue-shirted bodies writhed, or lay too still.

  Kennedy looked out to the Union guns. The glint of flashing metal through flame-tinged fog told him that too many samurai had evaded his snipers. The Japanese infantry was re-forming on the plain; a wide, deep cordon of men, taking up defensive positions around the depot. A few eighty-eights, in enemy hands or under their instruction, still pounded the hillside, grinding man and machinery into gristle.

  He said to his radio operator, “We can’t let them dig in.” He indicated a transient gap in the enemy line that was filling with sapphire-robed members of the Imperial Watch. They had mortars, heavy machine-guns and rocket-launchers among their kit. “Tell Wilson to bring up armour through there, mortar cover all the way. Have Crow God’s shooters pick away at their tank busters, fire at will. Red Thunder needs to split his dancers. Three companies engaging the picket lines, four intercepting those reinforcements making for the Rock.”

  “Yes, sir. What about the last two companies?”

  “Have them follow us.”

  His driver glanced back at him while the operator dispatched the orders. “Follow us where, Major?”

  He gave his driver’s shoulder a squeeze and pointed towards the growing barricade of bristling iron. “Through there. We’re going in with the tanks.”

  The driver grinned, turned to peer through the windshield, and floored the accelerator. Kennedy renewed his white-knuckle grip and the command car resumed its stormy route.

  Striking the plain,
they bounced along the fissured stone through a hail of flying metal. Bullets rang against the plating, snagged the snapping fabric of the flag. He felt a glancing blow strike his helmet. The radio operator’s grip on his shoulder drove him further beneath the command car’s cover. The ear-pummelling clank of steel tracks on splitting rock told him his armour was nearby. A choking bank of dust and filth obscured the clash in swollen tiers of glowing cloud. Shells shrilled by. Mortar fire rutted the dunes, sending showers of thick ochre spray into the already grime-filled air.

  “Pull up.”

  The driver braked hard. Two Jacksons surged out of a bulwark of sand and pulled ahead. Trucks, their frames seething with clinging dancers, listed into view. They set upon the Watch’s position. Dancers sprang from the sides of each truck and filed between the advancing Jacksons. A squad formed beside the settling command car.

  Kennedy tossed their leader a fleeting look.

  “Red Thunder says we’re with you.”

  Kennedy shrugged. He jumped the side rail and dropped onto the sand. He called out to the driver. “Grab the flag, leave the car.”

  The driver bundled the flag and joined him on the ground, along with his radio man. They all crept forwards, the squad fanning out to flank them. A shell, striking the side of the motionless car, rocked it in place. Another smashed through the rear deck. As the fuel tank erupted, Kennedy thrust himself forwards. The heat of the explosion washed over him. A metal wheel sliced the sand where he’d crouched.

  He thrust himself forwards again.

  The ground to all sides was a fractured hellscape. Frantic, afflicted cries completed the abyss. Shapes shifted in the haze ahead, multiplying as he advanced. They moved like men in fear. Lacking the dancer’s way, gracelessly stirring the shapes of ungainly packs and setting up weapons in plain sight, they perished under the rapid machine-gun fire of Kennedy’s squad.

  He forgot the cavern and the journal and Patricia’s scent. The universe tottered on every gained inch of ground.

  They came across a pile of watchmen. Their blue robes, parted and torn, revealed body armour not dissimilar to his own. Each soldier exhibited ghost dancer handiwork in the slashes, thick and deep, applied to their throats. A dancer lay moaning with his hands over his groin. Black skin puckered around the rude entry site of a fifty-calibre round. His clamped fingers barely staunched the flow of bright blood.

  “Company of Imperial Watch,” he called out to Kennedy. “Setting up machine-guns, launchers. Twenty feet ahead.”

  Kennedy signed to his squad leader. Six dancers began snaking forwards low over the sand and vanished into the smog. He told his radio man to call the tanks to cover.

  Short bursts of gunfire were answered with wild shrieks, then silence, then a low keening whistle.

  He sent the tanks onwards.

  “Please,” the dying man whispered.

  Kennedy had a brackish taste in his mouth. He signed to his squad leader. The leader crossed to the man and brought a pistol up beneath his jaw.

  “Thank you, Major.”

  The man had his gaze fixed on Kennedy. Kennedy held it firm. The Colt fired. His head fell back in swift release.

  They pushed forwards.

  They found their first samurai face down in the blood-crusted sand, a neat hole beneath his ebony plait. Another two bore the mark of Crow God’s snipers. The ground ahead presented a particularly choice piece of earthwork. He signalled Wilson’s tanks.

  Eight of the original fourteen had made it this deep into the camp. They found partial cover in newly fashioned hollows. Nose up, turrets depressed, each presented a limited target to their exposed foe. Ghost dancers dropped in the dirt beside the sunken vehicles.

  The watchmen, augmented by standard infantry and samurai sharpshooters, had sought cover among the casings of dead armour. Not far behind them, the artillery barrels of the Union 82nd pierced the sky, uselessly. The samurai had done their work.

  The Jacksons spat sabot rounds and machine-gun fire. The dancers saturated the Imperial line with mortar fire, yet the Japanese held their ground.

  The column of enemy reinforcements would soon be out of range, bound for Red Rock. He couldn’t raise Iron Horse on the radio. He couldn’t raise Hayes.

  A Jackson stewed in the blast of a rocket’s detonation before breaking up in an expanding ball of white flame. Scathing heavy-weapons fire nailed his men down. Incoming rounds sprayed dirt across his goggles and mouthpiece.

  There was a length of metal piping thrown wide of the shattered tank. Kennedy reached for it and felt the iron burn his fingertips. A bullet skimmed its curvature with a clang, sending a tremor up his arm. He ran the tattered remnant of the flag along its searing length and rose to his feet. He sent the tanks forwards.

  The air sang with bullets. He managed to brandish the banner in one mighty arc, two, before a blistering explosion in his right shoulder sent him back down to his knees.

  His vision blotched. His fingers fumbled in the dirt for the pipe.

  He was about to rise again when a one-twenty whipped the air overhead with a deafening wail. Then a salvo of blasts rent the air.

  Ahead, the Union guns, now lowered, were hammering the rear of the Japanese line. Stray shells slammed into the ground behind the pinned dancers.

  He rose to his feet again, slipping on slick earth. Dancers gripped him under each arm as they surged into the swirl of sand. He still had the flag. Figures lurched ahead and fell away. A samurai whirled out of the storm, katana raised. A tomahawk, its ribboned haft still quivering, cleft his face into crimsoned halves. Another’s swinging blade encountered the crossed staves of two dancer axes. Okinawa steel met Sioux iron in a shower of sparks. The dancer thrust the samurai to the ground and dropped the point of his knee on the Hachiman’s throat. Kennedy heard the cartilage crack, distinctly and clean.

  He’d somehow exchanged his flag for a watchman’s machine-gun.

  He squeezed the trigger. His body vibrated, synched to the weapon. He sprayed the enemy line. The barrel glowed red, then white. He held the trigger taut. His vision swam. The barrel melted. He cast aside the gun and reached for his Mauser.

  Blasted from behind and ravaged from the fore, the line of Imperials fell apart.

  A Jackson swayed past. Then Kennedy’s hand was on the side grip and he was riding the skirt. The tank was plastered with ghost dancers. An adjacent rider cast him a wild grin. The tank rose and fell on the crushed Japanese defences to enter the Union perimeter.

  Dead samurai lay twisted among the Union slain, but too many had been undone. The guns were undermanned. Turned outwards and low, the one-twenties and eighty-eights were arranged in a ring.

  Seeing the arrangement of the Union redoubt, Kennedy laughed, but the sound that emerged from his shielded mouth was a dry cackle. Circled wagons awaiting indian saviours redefined irony.

  His radio man planted the flag on a mound of cracked earth.

  Kennedy approached the nearest gun.

  XXVI

  April 29, 2012

  Red Rock, Nevada

  Malcolm had kept silent about Joseph’s letter. She hadn’t warned the others of his chosen doom. Lightholler, Morgan and Shine might be headstrong—or at the very worst naïve—but she’d never pegged them for lunatics.

  So much for that.

  She couldn’t use the radio for fear of alerting the enemy. Standing before Doc Gershon, afraid to disrupt his efforts, she pondered her choices.

  He misread her silence and said, “You couldn’t have known they’d go out there. You couldn’t have known they’d try to find him.”

  She shot him a quizzical look.

  “I know about the major’s arrangement, Miss Malcolm.”

  Confusion gave way to astonishment.

  “I’ve been down here the whole time,” he explained. “I saw everything.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Her voice rose in abject fury. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “It was h
is choice to make.” Doc returned his attention to the terminal.

  But that wasn’t enough. She leaned on the desk looming above him. “And here we are, with everyone off on some futile attempt to rescue someone who won’t allow himself to be rescued, and the Japanese are hammering at the door. Meanwhile, you’re still struggling with the jump points and Joseph’s sacrifice was for nothing.”

  “The major’s diversion bought us some time. His bargain will take care of the rest.”

  “What about Lightholler and the others?”

  “They’re with Tecumseh. He’ll get them back in time.”

  “How can you be so calm about it all?” she demanded, exasperated beyond belief. “Where is your heart, Doctor?”

  “It was buried in the sand a century ago, by Wells,” he replied evenly.

  He returned to his calculations.

  XXVII

  Lightholler’s band swept through the relic of Red Rock, covering the devastation on swift hooves. The ghost-dancer horses had received a training no less rigorous than the men themselves. Sure-footed, the mounts found purchase among the smoking pits as easily as on the infrequent stretch of untrammelled desert sand.

  The marks of the incursion were written on the scorched ruins of the prefabs. The armoury was a Stonehenge of skewed pylons, the grounds were littered with the Japanese dead. Deep tank tracks in the scored earth plotted the path of Iron Horse’s havoc.

  The kills grew fresher, until the occasional wounded soldier glanced up from a broken body with uncomprehending eyes. Morgan watched as an infantryman, piled among corpses, struggled to bring his rifle to bear on them. The soldier dragged his gun’s stock in the earth like a crutch. Shine caught the clumsy movement. The rifle barrel wavered in their direction. Shine, seeking the soldier’s eye, shook his head slowly. The soldier dropped his rifle and slumped back into his comrades.

  Under an orange sun their path was criss-crossed by wayward black smoke.

  Tecumseh trotted his mount to Shine’s side and tapped out a question on the transmitter. The reply took long moments. Tecumseh grunted the translation. “There’s no road west to the major. The bulk of a mechanised division lies between us. It’s one thing holding them off, another thing entirely traversing their ranks.”