Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising

by Jeffrey Mariotte

  “Hank, just rest,” Tuck said. “You’ll be—” He couldn’t finish the lie, so he went quiet again, letting Turville speak. He could hardly hear the man now. The end was close.

  “It … an honor,” Turville managed. “Captain Bring—”

  With that, the life rushed from him. Tuck held him for several minutes longer, Maier standing by and watching with a look of terror on his face.

  “What … is that thing?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t know,” Tuck admitted. “It’s what killed Daisie and the others. But it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before. Not human, but like no animal, either.”

  He released Turville, at last. He rose, unsteady, still clutching the badge in one fist. He put his other hand against the wall for balance. “We got to get them back to town,” he said. “Turville and that … that thing, both.”

  “I heard what he said,” Maier told him. “When he gave you the badge. When we are back in town, I will tell the others, back you if you want to be the marshal.”

  “I got a choice?” Tuck asked.

  “There is always a choice,” Maier said. “You could ride out now, the other direction. You could leave me to find my way home by myself. But I do not think you will.”

  “No,” Tuck said. He didn’t have to reflect much to know the answer to that. “No, I’ll go back with you. Got nowhere else to go, and being marshal can’t be the worst job ever.”

  But his gaze landed again on the dark, motionless shape on the floor, and he wondered how much truth there was to that, after all.

  PART TWO

  Memento Mori

  Chapter Seventeen

  There was nothing quite like a victorious return to the fort, Cuttrell thought. Any return was, by definition, a victorious one, at least for those who made it. Survivors were greeted with smiles and celebration; the only exception being, in his experience, when those who returned were fewer than half of those who left.

  This time, though, everyone who’d ridden out had come back, bringing one more besides, along with extra wagons loaded with ghost rock. Instead of skirting the edge of Carmichael he led the column down Main Street, across the hard-packed roadway that ran north and south, separating town and fort, and through the front gates, the ones that opened toward Main. The fort had been there first, and the town grew up just outside its walls, the nearest buildings less than a stone’s throw from the ramparts. Behind the fort, the mountains shouldered up close, so all the building had been done in the valley before it. Cuttrell waved at those who came out to watch, even the whores on their balcony at Senora Soto’s.

  He could see by their expressions, and pointing fingers, that it was the girl—the one Kuruk called “Little Wing”—who attracted the most attention. People cheered on the soldiers, but their cheers faded and their smiles dimmed, replaced by curious looks and shouted questions when they saw her sitting up in the back of the buckboard with an army blanket over her shoulders.

  As they passed through the doors to the fort, Jimmy McKenna ran up and threw a crisp salute. Cuttrell beckoned him over and leaned out of the saddle. “Jimmy,” he said, keeping his voice low. “We have no idea who the girl back there is. She was with the mule train—the only female on the whole train, as far as we could tell, and the only survivor. See if you can get a manifest for the train. I want to know everything. Who was behind it, where they were going, and most of all, who that young lady might be.”

  “Yes, sir,” McKenna said. “Everything go well otherwise?”

  “Well as can be expected,” Cuttrell replied. “The slaughter was horrible. Just horrible.”

  “Indians?”

  Cuttrell wasn’t sure how to answer that. “It doesn’t appear so, no,” he said after several seconds.

  “Who, then?”

  “That, Mr. McKenna, is something else we’ll have to find out. Get busy, now, and find out who our young passenger is. One mystery at a time.”

  * * *

  He brought the column to a halt at the parade field. People from town and from the fort had followed them in and surrounded them, extending their welcomes and good wishes. Cuttrell dismounted and worked his way back to the wagon. He had assigned a sergeant to drive it, but Kuruk had stayed close any time he wasn’t out ahead, performing his scouting duties. He had taken a special interest in the girl, for reasons Cuttrell didn’t understand. She seemed to respond better to him than to anyone else, too, so he didn’t discourage it. Some would no doubt object to an Indian being allowed in such proximity to a white girl, but he would address that when the time came. For now, Kuruk seemed a calming influence on her, and he protested any time she was out of his sight.

  Kuruk rode beside her now as she sat in the wagon, clearly terrified by so much attention. “People, people, leave the young lady be!” Cuttrell called as he approached. “All your questions will be answered in due time. She’s a stranger here, so let’s show her some Fort Huachuca hospitality instead of trying to frighten her out of her wits.”

  He cut through the crowd, waving his hands, and most of the people gathered around dispersed. Others stayed close, curiosity overwhelming common sense, but they backed far enough away for him to approach the wagon. “Welcome to Fort Huachuca, young lady,” Cuttrell said. She tried to smile, though panic was never far from her eyes. “This will be your home, at least until such time as we determine where you belong. I trust you’ll find it to your liking. These folks”—he raised a hand at the gathered crowd—“will settle down, in time. Try to ignore them.” He offered her a hand, to help her down from the wagon.

  She took the hand in hers, and said, “No soul is lost, only mislaid.”

  “Excuse me?” Cuttrell asked. She gazed blankly at him, as if she hadn’t spoken a word.

  “She doesn’t say much, Colonel,” Kuruk said quietly. “And what she does say doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

  Cuttrell didn’t pursue the subject. He eased her down off the wagon, and as he did, he saw Sadie coming toward them. Her gaze took in the girl, and their joined hands, and he could see the moment it all sank in for her. Her smile vanished and her eyes turned glacial.

  Everyone had questions about the girl, it seemed. But he had a feeling Sadie’s would be more pointed than most.

  Chapter Eighteen

  If Maier had been mildly annoying when there were several men on the posse, he was worse on the way back to town, pelting Tuck with questions about his service in the war, where he’d been since, what he had done besides drinking himself unconscious most nights. That wasn’t a question Tuck had much of an answer for. He had chased oblivion with the single-mindedness of a big-game hunter after a prize lion. The only difference was when the hunter bested the lion, he put its head on a wall. With oblivion, there was never any winning, just the constant pursuit.

  He felt better than he had in months, or longer. But Maier’s insistence on asking might, he reflected, be the one thing that could drive him back to the bottle.

  He asked himself sometimes what he had been hiding from all those years. The answer to that wasn’t simple. He had spent most of his life trying to escape childhood; his mother’s madness, his father’s violent end, and all the pain that those things had brought. He had, he thought, found a kind of peace in the army. He fought to preserve the Union, to free the slaves, to bring the rebel states back into the nation’s fold. The cause was just, the pursuit noble.

  But he had found out that, causes aside, men were still men and only as noble as their most base motivations. High-minded rhetoric and lofty ideals could not compensate for venality and the love of violence that prompted some to take up arms.

  That lesson had come through a series of events, escalating one after the other with the inevitability of a natural force. As surely as rain soaked the ground and made the creeks rise, the occurrences of that autumn cascaded one after the other in a way that could not be resisted.

  It had started as an expression of honest terror, an emotion with which no man who
had been through combat was unfamiliar, or could deny in any other. Captain Bringloe’s forces had vanquished a smaller cadre of Confederate troops, in Pennsylvania but near the Maryland line. After the battle, survivors among the enemy were being rounded up and taken to a central point to be questioned and sent to prison camps. A couple of Tuck’s soldiers had been assigned to count the dead and to make sure that they truly were dead, not feigning death in hopes of escape once the combatants had left the field. For this task, they used bayonets, and sometimes the toes of their boots.

  The fighting had been fierce, and there were plenty of dead on both sides. Tempers still ran high, and Tuck didn’t doubt that his men were more adamant than absolutely necessary when they performed their verification. At one point, he had looked over and seen a private named Roberts kicking a body, hard and repeatedly. The sound carried across the quiet battlefield, like a butcher tenderizing meat. “Easy, Roberts!” Tuck had shouted. “The fighting’s over for today!”

  “Just making sure!” Roberts called back.

  “Make sure more gently,” Tuck said. “Or I’ll assign someone else the chore.”

  “Sorry, Cap’n,” Roberts said.

  Tuck had thought that would be the end of it.

  It wasn’t.

  Rather than using his feet, Roberts had switched to the bayonet test. One didn’t have to stab hard or deep with a bayonet—if someone was pretending to death, the first touch would tell the tale.

  As Roberts moved through the ranks of the dead, poking and prodding, he was finding only genuinely dead people, and one who was wounded badly, not pretending but unable to stand on his own. A couple of soldiers took a stretcher to that one and carried him to the field hospital, where, despite his Confederate leanings, he would be treated.

  When he came to one body, Roberts poked it with the bayonet and watched for any telltale signs. Nothing happened, but Roberts, unsatisfied, reached down and rolled the body over so he could see the man’s face. He poked again, harder this time. Apparently satisfied, he moved toward the next corpse.

  But he had scarcely moved a foot away when the “dead” body sat straight up. Tuck had been looking elsewhere, but the shouts of several turned his attention to the field and he saw the rebel, sitting up, arms thrown out to his sides. His face had been largely obliterated, the skin flayed from it and burned around the edges, bone showing underneath.

  Roberts, though, had been so startled by the rebel’s sudden seeming rebirth that he stopped in his tracks and drove his bayonet through the back of the young man’s skull, using all the force he could muster. The point of it burst through the ruined face. The man had been dead all along, animated by some bizarre function of nerves, Tuck had thought. But the Confederate prisoners had only seen Roberts spear an obviously wounded, helpless young man from behind.

  Tuck didn’t know how word spread from prisoners to enemy soldiers in the field, but spread it had. Word got around about Roberts in particular, but the whole company had developed, through that one fluke incident, a reputation for unnecessary brutality.

  And every Confederate they engaged reminded them of it. When enemy troops realized they were up against “Bringloe’s Bastards,” they fought harder, showed no mercy, were resistant to surrender because word had spread that surrender meant death. Tuck didn’t understand that part, since if he had actually killed his prisoners on that one occasion, there would be no such rumors to contend with.

  The next escalation had come in North Carolina, after another bloody battle in a thickly wooded area outside Durham. Casualties had been high on both sides, but the Rebs had bulwarks and cannon on their side, and Tuck’s company had taken the brunt of it. During the fighting, Roberts had been captured. Tuck had been forced to retreat, leaving his dead where they’d fallen. But after they regrouped, they discovered that Roberts was missing. No one had seen him go down, although it was possible, they determined, that he had done so during the retreat, and nobody noticed.

  The next morning, Tuck and some of his men returned to the site of the battle, to collect their dead and see if Roberts was among them. They found him right away. He had been stripped naked, lashed to a tree, and flogged until flesh hung from him in curled ribbons. His eyes had been put out, his tongue and the end of his nose cut off. They had taken his scalp, and stabbed him dozens of times. When Tuck saw him, he was still alive, but barely. He moaned piteously, obviously in more pain than any human ought to have to endure. Tuck put an end to his suffering with a shot to the brain. He hoped Roberts’s torture and murder would put an end to the unreasoning animosity toward him and his company, which had gone far beyond the simple rivalries of war.

  But he hadn’t counted on the fury of his own men. Having seen Roberts’s state, some were caught up in a ferocious bloodlust that could not be quelled. Tuck tried to rein them in, to remind them that they were at war, and their activities had to be guided by strategic planning and the rules of combat, not a reckless thirst for revenge.

  He was overruled, and when he tried to physically prevent his men from acting, they threatened mutiny. In the end, his men did what they wanted. They found some of their enemies from the previous day’s battle, seven junior officers and a handful of enlisted men, having supper at a large farmhouse set upon the banks of a river. They were in the company of a dozen women and nine or ten children from the nearest town. Tuck’s soldiers stormed into the yard, between house and river, where supper was being served. They surrounded the officers and their civilian companions and shot them all. The women and children, they killed quickly, but they made the officers witness the atrocity before ending their lives.

  Tuck witnessed it, too.

  Then he tore off every patch and insignia that identified him as a soldier of the Union Army. He took his bedroll and canteen and haversack, his guns and his horse, and he abandoned his own company in the midst of enemy territory. Whether they ever made it to safety, he had never heard. Nor had he cared.

  He had seen what hatred could do. He had watched what happened when men were filled to overflowing with it, and had guns with which to express it. He had decided, that day, that he hated, too—he hated war and he hated killing and he hated guns and he hated the compulsion to seek violent revenge for acts of violence. Hated it in large measure, he knew, because he shared it. There was only one direction such a chain of events could spiral in, and it led straight to hell.

  Tuck had ridden toward the sunset, and he had not stopped in the four years since, except when the opportunity for obliteration presented itself. He had traded away the horse and the guns and eventually the haversack, bedroll, and canteen, all for liquor. He’d cowboyed when he could, begged when necessary, stolen when that was his last resort. He had run out of money and opportunity in Carmichael, on his way toward California, so he’d stayed put. And he had now awakened to find that he had become pathetic, a source of pity and amusement for people he once would have thought beneath him intellectually and morally, and he knew that he was everything they thought he was, a drunkard, an idiot, a punching bag, someone to look down upon when they needed to feel superior.

  During those lost years, he had decided his mother had been right all along. He was no better than his father, a useless waste of skin. Becoming an army officer had been an accident, no doubt due to the long war and a certain fluency with killing that Tuck thought might have been the only trait his mother had passed on to him.

  Hank Turville had changed all that. Turville had needed him, had trusted him, had counted on him. He had let Hank down, in the end, or he would be riding home with the man instead of leading a horse that carried his body. But still, he had been given back himself, the best gift anyone could receive. He had a long way yet to go, but he had tasted—after a long drought—respect and a sense of purpose that he had never thought he would again know.

  So he put up with Maier’s questions, though he offered little by way of response, and he rode toward Carmichael, bearing the marshal’s badge and the determin
ation to wear it himself, and to help keep the peace in that place that had given him so much.

  “Bringloe?” Maier said, when they were less than a day’s ride from town.

  “What is it, Alf?” Tuck asked, expecting another question for which he had no answers.

  “He’s … leaking.”

  “Who’s leaking?” Tuck asked.

  “The … whatever it is that you killed. He … it … is leaking.”

  “Leaking, how?” Tuck turned his horse around. Maier was riding behind him, leading the horse on which they had lashed the killer’s body, rolled up in a tattered blanket they’d found in one of the small hamlet’s houses.

  “Look,” Maier said.

  Tuck looked.

  Maier was right.

  A thick, oily black drop dangled from the bottom of the rolled blanket. Behind them, other drops had hit the ground, marking their trail for who knew how far. “You just now noticed this, Alf?”

  “It’s behind me,” Maier said. “Why would I look at a dead man in a blanket?”

  Maier had a point.

  “What is it?” Maier asked. “Is it blood?”

  “Doesn’t look like any blood I’ve ever seen. You know anything that bleeds black?”

  “No … but I have never seen the likes of that one before, either.”

  “Makes two of us,” Tuck said. He dismounted, handed his reins to Maier, and went back for a closer look. The drop that had been dangling finally released, hitting the ground with a dull splatting sound. Another one had already started to form, and Tuck realized that each one carried the horrible stink of the killer. His stomach churned, and he found himself wishing for a bottle, to blot out the sight and sound and smell and memory. With difficulty, he pushed that thought aside.

  “We gotta get him off there,” he said.

  “I do not want to touch that,” Maier said.