Dead Reckoning

by Lackey, Mercedes;Edghill, Rosemary

  “Walk to the back wall and get down on your knees facing it,” Shepherd said, releasing his grip on the handcuff chain. Jett hesitated until she heard the click of the Colt’s hammer being pulled back. “I don’t care whether you enter glory with a hole in you or just as God made you. While I’d enjoy showing you my work, I don’t insist on it.”

  Jett moved quickly to the rear wall. It was hard to get down on her knees with her hands behind her back, but Shepherd wasn’t taking any chances that she’d rush him while he was unlocking the doors. He thinks I’m some typical nervous female. Maybe I can use that. How? Think! She leaned her forehead against the wall and listened to the sounds coming from behind her. The chain locking the cellar doors rattled through the handles and the doors thumped open. She caught the scent of damp earth—and beneath it, the stink of dead flesh.

  “Get up. Jett, Jayleen, whatever your name is,” Shepherd said.

  “I can’t move with my hands behind me like this,” she said. She’d heard him cock his pistol before. Had he eased the hammer back down? Or would the next thing she knew be the impact of a bullet in her back?

  She heard him cock the Colt again.

  “I can’t!” she repeated desperately.

  She heard footsteps—Shepherd coming toward her—then he grabbed her wrists and yanked them upward. But his intention wasn’t to haul her to her feet. She felt both hands on her wrists as he fumbled with the lock of the handcuffs.

  He’s put the gun away—or he’s left it by the doors.

  “Now—” Shepherd began.

  The cuffs fell away from her wrists. Jett sprang to her feet, shoving Shepherd off balance. She turned as he staggered, and punched him in the jaw as hard as she could.

  He wasn’t expecting that. Girls slapped, they didn’t punch. But she’d had five brothers, and one of them had taught her everything he knew. As Shepherd fell backward, she saw he had his gun stuffed into his waistband again. She lunged for it but she wasn’t quick enough. Shepherd scrambled back out of the way and yanked the gun free. Jett was on hands and knees, her skirts tangled around her legs. She had an instant to register what was about to happen and try to ride the blow as he reversed the pistol and hit her with the butt as hard as he could.

  Light flared behind her eyes as she was knocked sprawling. Pain—nausea—dizziness—this wasn’t the first time she’d been hit, and she screamed inside her head that she had to get up, get moving. … She didn’t get very far before she felt a boot on her stomach holding her down. She forced her eyes open. Shepherd was standing over her, pointing his gun at her. As she watched, he wiped a trickle of blood away from his mouth with the back of his free hand. When he saw her looking at him, he stepped back out of reach.

  “Get the cuffs,” he said. “Slowly.”

  She sat up and drew a slow breath at the new surge of nausea it brought, then got carefully to her feet.

  “You’re just like all the rest of them,” Shepherd said conversationally. “The liars, the deceivers, the flatterers. You’re no different.”

  “You’re going to kill me!” Jett flashed angrily. “What the Sam Hill did you expect?”

  “I thought you’d have more interest in learning about my work,” Shepherd said. He actually sounded hurt. “I’ve discovered secrets lost to Mankind for thousands of years.”

  Yeah, and if Gibbons was here I’m sure she’d be chomping at the bit to go visit your secret zombie-making factory, Jett grumbled silently. “Why, yes indeed and thank you kindly, sir,” she said cuttingly. “Bless your heart! It would be a pleasure I’d never hoped for, sir, if you were to do me the honor of showing me your work.” Jett pulled her skirts wide and swept Shepherd a deep curtsey, her back very straight. She rose to her feet again and trudged over to where the handcuffs were. She had to walk past the open cellar. The stench wafting up made her heart beat faster in panic. Her head hurt vilely and she was probably going to be dead by sunset. But he doesn’t know about Gibbons and White Fox! And even if he does, even if he kills both of them too, Gibbons’s papa knows where she is. He’ll come looking.

  She picked up the cuffs and held them out to him. “Do you care for the pleasure, sir?” she asked evenly.

  “Put them on and close them,” Shepherd said, ignoring her defiance.

  He didn’t spell out front or back, so she chose front. The ratchets clicked as she closed them in place. She left them loose enough that she might be able to squeeze out of them. If she was left alone for long enough.

  “Now pick up the lamp.”

  She walked to the lamp and picked it up carefully. She could smash it to the ground—or just chuck it into the cellar. She could even throw it at him. If she dropped to the floor fast enough, Shepherd’s first shot might miss in the sudden darkness.

  But Jett wasn’t sure how fast she could move just now. And Shepherd had six bullets. Enough to hit her if he was lucky. More than enough to summon help. She was still hesitating when he spoke again.

  “Now go down the steps. Slowly.”

  When she held the lantern over the cellar opening, she could see an adobe brick staircase. She’d thought this “inner prayer house” couldn’t be much larger than the bunkhouse, but the stairs went down farther than she could see by the lamplight. Whatever’s down there, he won’t want to shoot it up if he can help it, and I might be able to find a weapon, she thought. It was more of a chance than she had standing right here. Jett didn’t doubt he had her marked for death. But Shepherd was like a stump preacher with an empty hat. He’d want her to listen to him first. Even better, she was betting he’d need to put in an appearance at the ranch-house long before he was done talking—so he’d lock her up, and he’d leave her alone, and that would be her chance. Shepherd would be confident because she was behind doors he’d chained shut. And Jett was just as confident she could pry them open if she had to.

  Carefully, she took the first step. It wasn’t difficult to move as slowly as Shepherd wanted, the hard part was getting down the steps without falling. She didn’t have a hand free to hold her skirts out of the way, and her boot caught in her hem with every step. A dozen steps down she froze at the sound of a loud booming sound behind her. Shepherd had closed the cellar doors. She turned quickly to look back to see if he’d just locked her in, but he was standing a few steps above her. He gestured meaningfully with the Colt. She turned away, steadied herself, and went on.

  By the time she could see the bottom of the steps, she realized she’d far underestimated the size of the cellar. The ceiling must be twenty feet high, and she couldn’t see the walls. She reached the bottom, took a few steps forward, and stopped.

  “Here we are, all nice and cozy,” Shepherd said. He took back the lamp. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Jett did as she was told. She knew there wasn’t any point in trying to escape while he was here. He’d hear her if she ran up the steps, and she didn’t think she could get the doors open before he started shooting. Suddenly she realized what she was seeing. Jett drew a sharp breath. The lamp Shepherd was carrying wasn’t shining off walls or ceiling, and its flame had dwindled with distance. Whatever this place was, it was enormous. Some natural cave he’d found? That was both good and bad. It meant more places for her to hide once she got free—if she couldn’t get all the way out. But if she got lost, she would have signed her own death warrant.

  Suddenly the lamp went out. The darkness surrounding her was absolute and choking, and she drew a long steadying breath, fighting the dizzying pain in her head. It was day. If there were any zombies down here, they wouldn’t be able to move. Suddenly a tiny blue flame flickered into life, and Jett bit her lip sharply. “Corpse candles,” they called them back home. You could see them at night in any graveyard—if you were crazy enough to go into a graveyard at night—eerie blue flames dancing over the graves.

  Oh Blessed Virgin help me—he’s brought me to a tomb, and if I can’t see I’ll never get out!

  The first blue light was swiftly joined by a
dozen more, then one of them flared white. In its glow she could see Shepherd holding a lamp that burned with a bright blue-white flame. Spirit lamps, she thought in relief, exhaling a shaky breath. Just like the ones Gibbons has.

  By the time Shepherd returned, her momentary panic was gone, and she could gaze at him blandly. He seemed a little disappointed she wasn’t more impressed.

  “Come with me,” Shepherd said genially. “These will be the last sights you ever see—but they’re worth dying for, I assure you!”

  “You ever bring anyone down here who agreed with you on that?” Jett asked with feigned interest. She didn’t think Shepherd would shoot her now. Only folks scared of what you might do shot you just for slanging them, not someone sitting in the catbird seat and holding all the aces. That kind would talk your ear off until you wished they would shoot you and give you some peace.

  “Mock me if you must. The world has mocked all great visionaries. Alexander—DaVinci—Galileo!”

  “They live in Texas?” Jett asked, just to be annoying, but she didn’t think Shepherd was paying much attention.

  He grabbed the chain between her wrists and towed her behind him. They were moving toward the other little flames, but she couldn’t get her bearings. Her feet skidded on tile for a few steps, then she tripped and nearly fell over the edge of a carpet as she hurried to keep up. If he accidentally pulled the cuffs off by dragging her behind him, he’d be sure to put them back on good and tight. She’d never get free then.

  Suddenly he turned and shoved her. She staggered, tripped over something she couldn’t see, and fell backward. Light flared behind her eyes, even as she realized she’d fallen onto something soft. A chair! She heard it creak, smelled buckram and horsehair and the ticklish dusty smell of goose feathers. It was low and soft, and she wouldn’t be able to get out of it quickly.

  Shepherd turned up the other lamps until they all burned white. There were eight of them around the edge of a wagon wheel; their combined light was too bright to look at. She looked away and heard a homely, familiar sound: the squeak of a pulley. When she looked back, he’d finished raising the chandelier. The room was bright enough to read in now.

  This place looks like Ali Baba’s Cave! Jett thought in amazement.

  She could only get a measure of the room’s size by fixing her gaze high on the far wall. The room was at least forty feet across and longer than it was wide. She was pretty sure you could drop all of Alsop in here and have room left to dance. It was difficult to be sure because the room itself was so cluttered. She saw stacks of gilt-framed mirrors and paintings, rolled-up carpets, marble-topped dressers and tables, one, two, four silver tea services, and a stack of wooden chests that obviously held sets of silver. A pile of pelts, fox and beaver, stacked so high they’d slipped and spilled over onto a stack of buffalo robes. And that was just what she could see. There was more, piled and stacked halfway to the ceiling. If Shepherd had gone through every townhouse and plantation house in all of Orleans County, he might have been able to fill this room as it was filled now. The thought made her dizzy. How long had he been looting towns and ranches with the help of his zombie army?

  But if this room was where Shepherd kept his loot, there were two things that didn’t fit.

  One was the two doorways she could see leading out of it, cyclopean archways built to the same brobdingnagian scale as everything she’d seen so far. If Shepherd had more than one treasure vault like this one, Jett couldn’t imagine what he needed with Texas. He could just buy himself a railroad.

  The other was the enormous something covered by a white cloth. He hadn’t covered any of the furniture. What was so special he needed to hide it under a dust cover?

  Shepherd walked nonchalantly over to a japanned secretary desk and lowered the door. On the desk inside were two painted wooden boxes. He opened one and popped several sugarplums into his mouth, then opened the other as he chewed and withdrew a cigar. He clipped off the ends and walked to the table where he’d left the other lamp, still chewing. Manners of a pig hog! Jett thought scornfully, but she watched him carefully. The pistol was back in his waistband, but she couldn’t get out of the chair quick enough to get it.

  Shepherd removed the glass chimney and bent over the flame. He puffed his cigar alight and then turned to look at her.

  “Normally I’d ask before smoking in the presence of a lady,” he said with an ironic bow. “But you, Miss Gallatin, are no lady.”

  “And you’re no gentleman,” she snapped.

  “Gentlemen are useless idlers, growing fat off the toil of those of us whom they deem to be their inferiors,” he said grandly. “They lack vision. Give one of them the least iota of power, and they will use it to oppress their betters.”

  “Like you, I suppose,” Jett said.

  “Like me.” He took a few steps closer and blew a jet of smoke into her face. If he expected her to cough or flinch away, she disappointed him. “You’ve already seen proof of my ability to raise the dead—and put them to good use. All this,” he added, gesturing grandly at their, surroundings “was accomplished by my resurrected allamatons! It’s a word of my own creation. From the Greek. It means ‘other acting.’”

  “Funny thing, but back home we just call them ‘zombies,’” Jett drawled.

  “My creation owes nothing to the heathen superstitions of Africa,” Shepherd said. “No, my allamatons owe their being to Goetia, queen of the natural sciences! They are raised and given purpose by the application of ‘Musica Universalis’—not sorcery, but science!—a mathematical concept first discovered in ancient Egypt! Aiguptos the Eternal, that dark kingdom of sorcery and alchemy!”

  I thought you said this was science—not sorcery? Jett knew better than to say that aloud. If there was one thing she’d learned in her brief acquaintance with one Honoria Gibbons of San Francisco, it was that folks who went on about “Science this” and “Science that” got really miffed when you pointed out the holes in their arguments.

  Jett realized she’d been right about Shepherd being starved for an audience. He’d been so careful to keep her out of sight as he brought her here she was pretty sure nobody else at Jerusalem’s Wall was in on his schemes—and that meant he had nobody to brag to. She just hoped that meant he wouldn’t give her up—meaning kill her and turn her into a walking corpse—until he’d given his tonsils a good airing, because that meant he probably wouldn’t be satisfied with just one gabfest. She folded her hands in her lap and sat very straight and gazed at him as if he were the most fascinating thing going. He ate it up, of course. He wasn’t that different from the boys back home, all of them thinking anything they had to say was just what a girl wanted to hear. She really was listening, though. For one thing, Gibbons would want to know every word Shepherd said. For another, he might eventually say something useful.

  It took him almost an hour to run down, and by then Jett had pretty much his whole life story—and she could read between the lines of it, too. His actual born name was George Wilson Shepherd, and he’d been born in 1822 on a farm near Chillicothe, Ohio, the middle of eight children. As a boy, he’d wanted to study law (he’d wanted to study anything that would get him out of doing an honest day’s work, Jett figured). Unfortunately his poor (but humble) family’s fortunes were wiped out by a flood. The Shepherd farm was bought up by the bank, and young Mister Shepherd’s daddy drank himself to death. His mama tried to keep the household together on her own for a few months, then packed up his younger sisters and threw herself on her own sister’s mercy, and that of her sister’s husband. He would have been happy to count himself in on the deal, but none of his surviving kin could see any reason an able-bodied young man couldn’t support himself, and they weren’t keen about loaning him any money either, so George Shepherd became a schoolteacher (a career that lasted longer than Jett expected). But he still wasn’t minded to turn his hand to a job of work—he lost one position after another for spending more time on what he called his “researches into Natural
Philosophy” than he did on the work he was paid to do.

  From the way he skated over the details, Jett guessed there was a little more to it than that, but it wasn’t as important as the bee Mister Shepherd got in his bonnet about coming up with an “elixir” he could use to make his fortune. That got him run out of town on a rail over what he called “ignorant superstition and arrant persecution” (and what Jett suspected ordinary folks might call “poisoning”). But by then, he was hot on the trail of what would become his “Elixir of Allamatonry.”

  “But the Elixir is only a part of the whole, magnificent achievement though it is!” he said, striding back and forth in front of her as if he were giving a public lecture (or was a pigeon on a sidewalk). “It is not enough to create the allamaton! One must then control it! I nearly despaired, Miss Gallatin! But the life of the mind which was my comfort and refuge came to my aid! For you see, the ancient pagans believed that audible sound had the power to heal or to kill. From that bare hint, my genius refined upon their primitive superstitions in ways they never dreamed of. You see—in fact, as you will soon see for yourself”—he emended with an obscene chuckle—“once a body has been prepared with my Elixir of Allamatonry and undergone the purging alchemy of extinction, I can instruct it with my “Musica Universalis” to act at my command!” He paused expectantly.

  “You poison folks and then caterwaul at ‘em until they do what you want?” Jett asked doubtfully. She supposed what she’d heard the night he’d brought the zombies back to Alsop must be that “Musica Universalis” he was going on about.

  “More! Far more! I will show you!”

  He strode to the muslin-shrouded object and pulled away the sheet that covered it. It was the biggest pipe organ Jett had seen outside of a church. Its brass pipes gleamed in the lamplight. Brother Shepherd walked around to its side. Jett couldn’t see what he did, but whatever it was made a glugging sound like water being poured out of a stone jug, followed by a low constant drone. The pipes rang faintly, as if a wind was blowing through them.